2018-02-19

Men Have, Women Are

Note 1: I'm by default reluctant to write anything explicitly
related to gender issues, because our society has a very special
way of being stupid about that, and it doesn't feel like adding
my voice to the mess would really be, you know, adding
anything. I think in this case an exception is justified, because
I might genuinely have things to say here which are so
controversial that they probably haven't been said before.

Note 2: Yes, I know, it's very easy to nitpick about the
title. There's always some clever trick that can turn phrases
like "be beautiful" into "have a beautiful body", and "have
respect" into "be a respected person". Regardless, I think
there's a natural way to cognitively relate
"feeling-of-being" to certain aspects of human existence, and
"feeling-of-possession" to others. Thank you for understanding.

First, let me tell you how I finally Got feminism. The common
image is that feminism is about equality of men and women. It is
also that feminism is a social and political movement. Take a few
seconds to reflect on how stupid these ideas are. If you
consider it from a distance, the movement never actually really
managed to convincingly put up a pretense of having any
coherent utility function in the political world. And also,
taking a honest look at the whole "equality" agenda as it is
currently understood, I think it is overall hurting women
more than it's helping them.

Instead, I now understand, the appeal of feminism always came
from it being mainly a psychological movement. The
generator of the political and social side of it was "whatever
you had to say at the time to help to put women in a certain
mental state". And by its nature, it could never propagate
completely by the political message alone. It had to include at
least some contact with already-liberated women in real
life.

If you look around, the version of feminism we have today is
hopelessly garbled, to the point that most women don't
even realize that it ever used to be about something else than
the political gibberish. I think some of the real spirit has
survived in LGBT communities, because they are the ones that are
actually forced to stand in opposition to much of the broader
society. And who knows, maybe there are some pockets of it
surviving elsewhere. But if there are, I haven't seen them.

This brings us back to the One Problem (Almost) All Women
Have. There's a very deep level on which human values are
basically genetically (or prenatally) programmed, and it turns
out that (surprise!) men and women tend to have different values
written in. Now this is devastatingly, mind-numbingly obvious
from an evolutionary psychology perspective, while also being so
controversial as to be basically unspeakable in the current
political climate: yes, there are psychological differences
between men and women. And yes, those differences are
significant.

I am reminded here of the well-known poem about lesbian
sheep:

And alas, her true love, just a few yards away,

tries the very same thing in the very same way,

and though they both want to be loved and be held,

they just stand around, and wait to be smelled...

The issue I'm bringing up today isn't quite the same one, but
the analogy is obvious. Men are programmed to execute their
sexual strategy by a combination of grabbing what they
need, in both the social and material sense, with a little
bit of personal charm maybe mixed in there somewhere. While women
are programmed to mostly want to be intrinsically
attractive, according to whatever the society they were
brought up in defined that to be.

One of the evolutionary reasons for this seems simple: as a
man, you have the option of walking away. It's not
great, but if the going gets rough, and especially if
you are still young, walking away from your tribe is probably the
right choice - and has been for most of your ancestors. While as
a woman, if your life becomes unbearable, the best you can hope
for is to signal that you wish to be snatched away.
Walking away by yourself is very close to (reproductive,
evolutionary) death. All of this of course has nothing to do with
the modern world, but ancestrally-determined sexual strategies
remain the motivation behind most of people's lives. And
the number of women you'll see everywhere who feel miserable and
just keep on doing the signaling... it's
heart-wrenching.

People are very good at pretending that they do
something else, while executing their sexual strategies.
Obviously, they also pretend this to themselves, most of the
time. And yet if you know what to look for, you'll see clearly
how sexual strategies are upstream of most of awake time spent by
people living on this planet, with exceptions mostly caused by
people being in danger of dying.

An attentive reader will notice that according to this
framework teaching people rationality and self-awareness should
directly reduce their reproductive fitness. Yes, very much so.
But it's not that terrible, because the world has a
serious deficit of people who do things for other
reasons than their sexual strategy.

I've been known to cause outrage by suggesting that people who
really care about something shouldn't have romantic
relationships. Think what would happen if I dared to suggest that
those people should also seriously consider getting
castrated. That would be crazy! And who am I to suggest that
basically everyone claiming to be doing good is faking
it? Then people would feel bad about themselves. We can't
have that!

4 comments:

Why do you think learning rationality and self-awareness reduces reproductive fitness? I don't think it does in my case. When I can admit to myself that I use every moment of spare time on the project of getting laid I can do it much more joyful effective than when I have to expand brain cycles on hiding this form myself.

This might be the case if you plan short-term, but it's pretty likely that if you extrapolated your preferences into a coherent utility function, you'd want to give up getting laid to achieve instrumental goals which would allow many, many more expected instances of you getting laid to happen across the multiverse.

I apologize for the hostility in my voice, it is, regrettably, fully intended, but I don't think my preferences are coherent enough in the first place to be extrapolated into a coherent utility function.

So the description of the world here seems correct but the claim that men could evolutionarily walk away and women could not seems silly to me. Matrilocality is rarer than patrilocality, right? This could be the case if you're talking about behavior differences from much earlier and if human ancestors were like gorillas or chimps they were patrilocality as well .